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Moribund ways

My latest hobby, shunning social media, is, as Dorcus Lane is wont to say, my one obsession, and here you may notice a hint of malevolence, albeit enunciated as delicately as a dragonfly flutters its violet-tipped wings over the blistering green of a lilypad.

And all this ecstatic and ebullient talk of insects serves as the frontispiece for this bit of gristle: the facebookian logic of publicly posting fescennine photos of myself, in close communion with my boss, rather escapes the cuniculi and dark alleys of my better judgment. Still, live and let live. Who am I to defend moribund ways, to hark back to the days when privacy was still scintillatingly sacrosanct? And I should point out that I speak of my former boss, at my former place of employment, and so on. But the fragile entity known as the ‘self’ persists though our long litany of places of employment, the eventual destruction of our credit card rating, and our undiminishable horror at having been placed on some sort of kafkaesque stop list, and that’s the rub, isn’t it? The more they know about us, the more material they have to play with—so why give up our personal life voluntarily?

And as a consequence of my visceral rejection of newfangled ways, this humble conjurer is no longer accepting comments–a highly ineffective (feeble really) boycott of the most cherished tenets of social media (to say nothing of the malady of ‘liking’ as a surrogate for ‘won’t you please visit my pages, big boy’). And if you insist on taking this chastisement personally, you may (but take my advice and don’t) because I have more than a soupçon that this has far more to do with the delusions of a recalcitrant author than it has to do with you, dear reader (in the Baudelairean sense?).

Of course I may some day be lauded for having coined the word ‘facebookian,’ and once I expiate the shame of having unwittingly promoted that what shall remain nameless–faceless more aptly–brand, I may, at or around the hour of my death, rejoice unreservedly at the tenuity of my contribution to humanity. But death bed scenes are so tedious and I will spare you the horrors of such tripe.